KARSTIC ANALOGS FOR ANCIENT GREEK CONCEPTIONS OF OCEANUS AND TARTARUS

In their myths, ancient Greeks used strong observational knowledge of caves and karst structures to envision a dynamic subterranean world of caverns, interconnecting conduits, and subterranean lakes and rivers. This paper examines geological and linguistic aspects of ancient descriptions of the underworld Tartarus and the globe-encircling River Oceanus. The authors, an environmental scientist and a classical philologist, propose that Greek myths about Tartarus and Oceanus connect karstic landscape features with deep human questions: Why are earthly waters so dynamic and life-like? What keeps Zeus in power? What happens when people die? Why does the Sun set in the west and rise in the east?

Homer describes Tartarus as a deep pit (in Greek, barathron) to which the Titans were consigned after their defeat by Zeus. Hesiod gives a more detailed picture of the chasm (Greek chasma) of Tartarus. In describing what happens to souls after death, Plato cites the Homeric description of the barathron of Tartarus when he describes Tartarus as a vast underground network of streams and caverns; this undoubtedly was inspired by observations of cave environments in Athens or elsewhere in the Greek world. Strabo and Pausanias use the term barathron for the passages through which subterranean streams flow in karstic formations. Athenians denied ritual burial to the bodies of certain criminals by casting them into ‘the barathron’, a practice that aligns Athens’ punishment of criminals with Zeus’ punishment of the Titans: in each case the world order is preserved when a disruptive force is controlled by being confined to unknowable deep caverns and subsurface streams.

Observations of surficial and subterranean streams also contributed to representations of Oceanus. The myth of the Sun-god Helius’s nightly traverse of Oceanus’s waters may refer to an underwater passage through flooded karstic tunnels, thereby resembling other legends of gods who travel through subterranean conduits. Myths of Acheron, Styx, and points of access to the Underworld also incorporate karst features. To explain otherwise unknowable aspects of human existence, Greeks envisioned mythical places at the unseen edges of the Cosmos as analogous to karstic features encountered in the known world.